OPINION: Have you made a hurricane plan for your family?

Author's Note: As my regular readers will likely recall, I was heavily involved in redrafting our region's evacuation plans after the disastrous Rita evacuation in 2005. Every few years, I remind everyone about the importance of having a plan in the event a major hurricane threatens our area and update the reminder with the latest information.

Hurricane season officially started last week. Various forecasters are predicting an unusually busy season this year. While I am generally skeptical of these long-range forecasts, there are some reasons to suspect this season could be more active. This is a good decision of the prospects from my friend Matt Lanza and Eric Berger on Eyewall.

While the official Hurricane season is June 1 to November 30, we generally do not see much activity until late in July and rarely have any activity after the first week in October. However, warmer ocean temperatures could push that window out either direction.

So, we probably have a month or so before we will have to be seriously worrying about a hurricane heading our direction. That gives you some time to think about what you will do in the event one does head this way.

To Evacuate or Not?

In the event of a major hurricane, the most pressing question Houston area families will have to answer is whether they should evacuate or not. For most in the region, the answer is to not.

We discovered in Hurricane Rita that there are very serious consequences from the decision to evacuate. Approximately 150 individuals died in the Rita evacuation. That is more people than have died in any Texas hurricane, except the Great 1900 Storm.1

Most were elderly and died from stress-related afflictions. A few died from carbon monoxide affixation while sitting in an idling automobile. Of course, hundreds of thousands were trapped in miserable circumstances for many hours. While evacuation plans have greatly improved since Rita, she proved that evacuating entails some risks.

The State of Texas has designated areas as evacuation zones. People who live in those zones should have an evacuation plan and be prepared to evacuate when the order is given. The zones are designated by zip code. This is a map of the zones with the zip codes included. Note that Zone C reaches within a short distance of downtown from the southeast.

Click on map for more detail.

The evacuation of these zones will be called from the coast inland with the more inland zones called as the storm surge forecast worsens. If you live in one of the State designated evacuation zones you must evacuate when ordered by local officials.

These are areas that have been identified as likely to be inundated by a hurricane’s tidal surge based on the storm’s strength. Residents of these areas have no choice. If officials call for their zone to be evacuated, they must, by law, leave. While generally emergency personnel do not arrest people and force them to leave, staying put in the face of an evacuation order will put you and your loved ones at risk, and potentially risk the lives of first responders if they are forced to attempt last minute rescues. 

Any of you that live in those areas and think that you might ignore the evacuation order, think again. A hurricane tidal surge is like a tsunami that keeps coming for hours. As the surge destroys structures in its path. The flotsam created from that debris becomes a battering ram that flattens anything in its path. 

If you doubt this, go online and do a search for pictures of the Mississippi coast after Katrina. In the area hit hardest by the surge, it appears that God took his hand and wiped everything clean for a mile or so inland.

And the water coming at you is not pristine beach water. It has picked up everything in its path, including oil, sewer from over-run treatment plants, chemicals and dead animals. It is a filthy, polluted soup that can kill you. 

There were a number of stories from Hurricane Ike of people who stayed, making last minute telephone calls to family or emergency services shortly before they were swept away. If you live in the surge zone and do not evacuate, you are seriously jeopardizing your life and your loved ones who live with you. 

People Outside the Surge Zones

For the vast majority of residents in the region who do not live in the hurricane evacuation zones, sheltering in place, or as Judge Emmett famously said during Hurricane Ike, “hunkering down” will be the best option.

Most emergency managers often recite the adage, “run from the water - hide from the wind.” As a general proposition, this is good advice and supported by the statistical evidence that the vast majority of deaths in hurricanes are caused by drowning. 

Absent special circumstances, you should not evacuate because you are concerned that you may lose electricity. If that is your only concern, you will be much better served by sitting out the storm to see if you lose service or not. By waiting, you will have a chance to assess and possibly mitigate damage to your property. And then if you do lose electricity, you leave the area after the storm has passed and the roads are clear.

Not evacuating just to avoid an electrical outage is especially advisable when you consider the degree of forecast uncertainty. When Rita was just 24 hours from landfall, there was still only a one-in-four chance of a direct hit across almost 250 miles. Considering that an evacuation will be called 48-72 hours ahead of landfall, many calls for evacuation will likely be false alarms. If you evacuate every time a storm threatens because you are concerned that you will lose power, you may find yourself on the road a lot for no reason.

There are, however, some dangers for those that live outside the surge zones if they stay in their homes, from the wind and upland flooding.

Hurricane force winds can extend as far a hundred miles inland. This is a map that shows the maximum sustained winds generated by Hurricane Ike. And unlike the recent derecho storm, these winds will go on for hours.

Most structures can withstand these winds. But I took a helicopter flight over the path of Rita shortly after the storm passed and I saw many homes which lost their roofs and had significant water damage. A few totally collapsed. And there are occasionally serious injuries and fatalities from wind-related incidents.

Mobile homes are particularly vulnerable to high winds. If you live in a mobile home and you are anywhere near the central wind cone, find other shelter. 

And as we have recently seen, trees near your home can be a risk. When I took my helicopter tour of the Rita path it was hard to comprehend the number of trees that were blown down. Pine trees are particularly problematic. On that flight, I saw a number of instances where a pine tree had fallen through a house, cutting it in two like a knife going through a cake. If you have large trees in your yard (and in particular pine trees) that could fall on your house if they came down, and it appears you will be in the most severe wind cone, I would recommend that you find other shelter.

Also, be mindful that while a hundred-mile-per-hour wind might not blow down your house, it will pick up all sorts of things and turn them into lethal projectiles. Secure anything around your house that might be caught by the wind. This is particularly dangerous for homes that have large plate-glass windows. If you have this situation and are unable to secure the windows with plywood or other protective covers, you might consider finding other shelter.

In addition to the wind, residents outside the surge should also consider their vulnerability to upland flooding. This is not the flooding that is caused by the hurricane pushing the Gulf of Mexico up onto land, but rather from the storm dumping torrential rainfall on the watershed and flooding the bayou system like we saw in Harvey. A strong tidal surge can exacerbate upland flooding by acting as a dam and not allowing the bayous to drain as they would normally.

Unfortunately, this type of flooding is virtually impossible to predict. But if you flooded in Harvey, you may want to consider having a sheltering alternative on higher ground, especially for slow moving storms.

Sheltering vs. Evacuation

With respect to these secondary risks, it is far preferable to find suitable shelter near your home rather than attempting to evacuate the area entirely. Even in the best of circumstances, attempting to evacuate just the designated surge zones is going to be a difficult problem. The fewer people we have on the freeways trying to leave the area, the less the likelihood of another Hurricane Rita evacuation debacle. Consider friends or family nearby you could stay with until the storm passes. Also, various local governments typically open public buildings as shelters.

Reliable Sources of Forecast Information

 Unfortunately, I have too frequently found that the media hypes the risk of approaching storms. By far, the best source of information is Space City Weather, run by Eric Berger and Matt Lanza. They also have a companion site The Eyewall, that I have previously cited, dealing exclusively with tropical storms. Their posts give realistic, “unhyped” descriptions of the likely effects of storms potentially approaching the Gulf Coast. For the somewhat more technically inclined, the National Hurricane Center’s website is also a good source. There is also a very good app named Hurricane Tracker that can be downloaded to smart phones.

Make a Plan Now

But here is the really important point: make your plans now. Do not wait to decide if you are going to evacuate and where you are going to go until a storm is grinding down on us in the Gulf. We all tend to make poor choices when under stress and people around us are panicking. Also, while most storms originate in the Caribbean, which gives us nearly a week to prepare for their arrival, there have been a number of storms that originated in the Gulf, giving us as little as 48-72 hours to make preparations.

Set aside some time to think about these issues. Do the research and determine if you are in a surge zone or if your home is subject to some of the other risks I have discussed. Decide in advance at what level storm you will evacuate or seek other shelter. Make a plan regarding where you will go and what you will need to take with you. If you are going to shelter in place, plan what you will need to do to be ready. Make checklists. There are detailed hurricane checklists available.  This is a good one from the Red Cross.

Conclusion

Twice in the last two decades, the Houston region has stared down the barrel of a loaded gun as both Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Ike were on a course to make landfall around Freeport, what forecasters refer to as the Scenario 7 Storm. In Rita’s case, it was one of the strongest Category 5 hurricanes on record. Even though Hurricane Ike came ashore as only a Category 2 storm, if it had made landfall 20-30 miles to the west, the storm surge could have easily been ten feet higher in the Houston region. The truth is that we have dodged two bullets. We now know that a storm making a catastrophic landfall for the Houston region is not just a hypothetical possibility.

We also know what a mess a full-scale evacuation of the area can be. Even with the improvements made to the evacuation plans since Rita, evacuating up to a million residents is never going to be a pretty picture. 

But you can minimize the effect of a major storm on your family and home by planning ahead. Do it today.

I-45 North during Rita evacuation.

Note 1 - Some Texas history buffs have contended that the 1875 hurricane that struck Indianola may have killed as many as 300, although the records are sketchy.  

Bill King is the former mayor of Kemah, Texas. He served on Texas gubernatorial commissions studying the aftermath of both Hurricanes Rita and Ike. In 2006, he served on a task force appointed by the County Judges of Harris, Galveston and Brazoria Counties to revise the region’s evacuation plans in the wake of the disastrous Rita evacuation. In 2006, the National Hurricane Conference awarded him their Outstanding Achievement Award for his work in this area. In 2009, he was one of the founding directors of the Gulf Coast Community Protection and Recovery District, which initiated the process of attempting to build the Ike Dike.